(by the late Doctor Mohummed Haroon, ‘The Islamic Times, Jan 1998, vol:13’
c/o North Gate Road, Edgeley, Stockport, SK3 9NL, England)
It is very common to read in Muslim political writing that Islam is not a culture but a politics. To many Muslims, these writers say, Islam is just Salat, and Milad - An - Nabi, and certain marriage rules. These writers go on to say: Islam should be politics, by which they mean a struggle for an Islamic State of the Maududi or Khomeini type. At the opposite extremes, some Muslim writers insist that politics has no place in Islam, but that Islam should be just a personal belief and a private practice. To them, culture means the five pillars, and that is what Islam should be.
It is the aim of this article to show that both of these view points miss the point, which is that Islam is also a community. It is a community in Britain, and in each separate country of the world where there are Muslims. It is also a world community, the Umma, with over one thousand million members. And all these Muslims are brothers and sisters of one another. And they share a common life, in the mosque, in the Sufi Tariqat, in the locality, in the family, in the nation ,and all over the word, and in all sorts of ways, to many to name.
The real point is for Muslims to see the Muslim community as the centre of their activities, and to put the culture and the politics second to the development of the community, for only through community development can the culture and politics of Islam succeed.
To very many Muslims in modern Britain Islam is just a culture. They will tell you that Islam is their personal belief, and they are Muslims in Britain in the same way that the Catholics and Anglicans are just believers in their personal belief. The real meaning of these ideas is that the Muslims ceases to be a member of the Muslim community, and just becomes a member of the Kaffir society, who just happens to do Salat, and Fast in Ramadan etc.
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The Islam they believe in is usually adapted so as to fit into British society, usually by taking large doses of Islamic modernism. Many Muslims are hardly aware that they are doing this. They see the aim as to get a good job in the Kaffir society, and their whole life is aimed at this attempt to leave the Muslim community, and settle down as a member of the white society. They value this especially for their children, and do everything they can to push their children on to succeed in exams so that they’ll be able to rise to the top of British society. Usually, if they do well, they move away from the Muslim districts, and do everything to fit in with their English neighbours and fellow employees in their good jobs. To them, the Muslim community is something to believe.
To some Muslims in modern Britain Islam is just politics. The aim is political mobilisation of the Muslims. This has broadly two different types of aim. One is the building of an Islamic state. This will totally replace and dominate the community, and replace the community with a centralised political structure. The second is to mobilise the Muslims so as to put pressure on the state to grant concessions of various kinds to the Muslims. The aim of these concessions is to enable the Muslims to rise higher and higher in Kaffir society, until they finally become members of that society. In this way the community is seen as something to leave. In both of these types of political activity the community is put firmly second, and that community is seen only as a source for potential voters and activists who can add weight to the political activity. If these politics were to succeed, then the community would seize to exist as the Muslims vanished in to the white society, or the community was replaced by a tightly organised and centralised political structure.
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Both the policy of culture and the policy of politics is faulty. The correct policy is to put first the development of the community. The aim is to increase brotherhood and sisterhood, and have policies to develop the community via the creation of employment and the development of businesses, and, via the development of Ulama and Awliya to lead the community, and the promotion of deeper and deeper knowledge of Islamic culture, and greater practice of this same culture.
The policy of pursuing culture outside the Muslim community, as a member of the Kaffir society, will fail. The culture can not be practiced without a community. If you live far from mosques, and far from shops selling halal food, how can you practice Islam? Faith withers and dies if the person is not constantly meeting other Muslims. Knowledge of Islam depends on constantly meeting Muslims, with whom the faith can be discussed, and who can point the Muslims towards books and magazines. In effect, if Islam is just a personal belief cut off from the community, the result will be isolated Muslims who will slowly drift away from Islam, abandoning now this and now that part of the faith.
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And the Muslim isn’t welcome in the Kaffir society. The experience of Muslims who make a lot of money and move to upper class areas is that the English people they’re are extremely unfriendly. I once attended a Zikr in a middle class area held at the house of a rich Muslims. When the Muslims began chanting the Zikr, the English neighbour called the police to complain about the noise nuisance! And of course only a few get the good jobs. The Kaffirs refuse to help the Muslims, and those who leave the community will mostly end up at the bottom of Kaffir society, as just another set of poor "coloureds"! The few who do get to the top of Kaffir society will also end up abandoning Islam, as they ponder to the culture of the rich in Britain, which is golf and whisky. We have only to look at the Arab jet set to the complete decay of Islam that takes place when a very rich Muslim tries to get to the top of the Kaffirs society.
The policy of pursuing politics without concentrating on the community, which I have described, is also a complete failure. The Islamic State project is, of course, completely hopeless in Britain. But elsewhere in the world it has failed, leading to the terrible blood bath in Algeria, and the terrible and pointless violence by both Islamists and the State in Egypt. Those who control the States in the Muslim world aren’t going to let the Muslims use the State to benefit themselves! And the use of politics to try and open the gates of Kaffir society to the Muslims is also pretty useless. The various attempts at getting affirmative action to benefit the Muslims have failed miserably. The British State has refused to extend the race relations legislation to cover the Muslims, having recently rejected the report of the Runnymede Trust. And only after a long struggle did the Muslim schools get state funding. If this policy has results, it is to help the Kaffir state in its attempts to assimilate the Muslims, and destroy the community. Another result is to provoke tremendous hatred against the Muslims. The attempts at Islamic revolution in the Muslim world are viewed with the greatest fears and hatred in the west, and every Muslim in Britain pays the price for what is going on in Iran and Egypt etc. Attempts to get affirmative action also provoke deep hatred among the British, who think that "these Muslims are after our jobs".
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A further aspect of much of this anti-Community Islamic politics is that it is controlled by misguided Muslims, who would like to destroy traditional Islam. They don’t want to develop the community, but wish to control it, and so they wish to destroy and overthrow all the existing leaders of the community. They regard their Muslim brothers and sisters as Mushriks, and they would love to break up the community, forming their own small groups which they control, breaking them away from the main community. The basis of the community is traditional Islam. In fact culture and politics can only succeed for Muslims if the development of the community is put first. Instead the pursuit of culture and politics undermines the community. The Muslim to whom Islam is just a personal belief puts all his efforts in to his attempts to climb the career ladder. The political activists put enormous efforts and large amounts of money in to political activity, and especially in to the development of Islamist political parties.
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All this activity should be put in to community development. The Muslims should be seeking to develop careers with in the Muslim community. They should be trying to develop businesses, and Islamic investment. The political activists should be putting their efforts in to Islamic education, in to libraries and madrassahs, to bring up a new generation of Islamic scholars who become the Ulama and Awliya of the coming age, and provide the community with real leadership. The resources that are wasted are so great that substantial results could be achieved quickly if these people moved their targets from jobs in Kaffir society and politics to real community development. Culture can, of course, only flourish if the community is developed. The Muslim who wishes to have a real personal faith and a real knowledge of Islam must have mosques to go to, and madrassahs and Tariqats for himself and his children. And above all to have a rich Islamic culture you need talented and wise Ulama, and they can only be developed if you have a big Community which is flourishing in every way.
Similarly Islamic politics can only flourish if the community is built. Muslim politics too often has destroyed the community. The modernists rulers of the Islamic world have tried to create societies that were in no way different from western Kaffir society. Modern Fundamentalist Islamic state also would do everything to undermine the community. The whole point of these Islamist political parties is to replace the Ulama and Awliya as Community leaders with the political party. All independent community organisations would be states replaced by the Islamic. These groups also claim Ijtihad, and would use it to bring in all sorts of innovations. But the main innovation would be putting politics and political activism in place of the traditional religious life. At the present time the main danger of these Islamist political parties is that they aim especially at the youth, and at the educated youth in the universities, and try to lure them away from the Community.
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The real way to have a successful Islamic politics is by Community building. If the Community grew and developed, and developed an Islamic identity, it would represent a greater weight in society, and provide an organised Islamic mass of people to exert and influence on the state, if only in elections. Proper community development would provide a mass of people with a developed Islamic consciousness, who would influence politician and government. But, of course, the aim of this politics wouldn’t be Islamism or an Islamic State, or affirmative action to get Muslims a better place in Kaffir society. The aim of the politics would be to defend the Community, and to help its development. That kind of politics with a community behind it would be extremely powerful and successful, and would be extremely practical and sensible, and would not provoke the chaos and hatred that the other kind of politics provokes.
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Those who talk of Islamic culture should realise that the actual effect of Islamic culture is to build the community. If you have Salat in mosques, these mosques provide a social centre for the community. If you have Zakat, the community is bound together by the charitable giving involved. Ramadan is a great upsurge of the community, with large attendance at mosques for Travi prayers, and a huge communal celebration at the end of Ramadan on Eid. And Hajj goes a long way to creating the reality of an international Umma. Jumma draws the whole community together every Friday. So even if a Muslim hopes to confine Islam to a personal belief and the five pillars, the actual effect is to develop a large community. The point is to do this consciously, so that the culture is seen as serving the community. The real battle of the modern world for Muslims isn’t having a personal belief system, or building an Islamic state. The real battle is the preservation of the Muslim community. The most extreme example of this was in Bosnia, where there was a deliberate attempt to wipe out an old Muslim community. And of course, all over the communist world there was an attempt to wipe out Islam, and with it any sense of there being a community of Muslims. But capitalism also has the affect of wiping out the community, by dispersing it through the operations of the market, drawing people into market relations which ignore religion and community. In Britain the Muslim is tempted to work in a large firm where a host of different races and religions work side by side, and Muslim identity means nothing. And now we have a global market, which is more powerful. There is also all the pressure towards migration, so that Muslims wish to leave Muslim lands and settle far away, outside the Muslim community.
In modern society the welfare states make the state itself the center of community. It has the effect of undermining the family and community, for people don’t need these, but depend instead on the D.H.S.S.! The whole rise of feminism and the new female culture is a huge threat to the community, as they break down the family which is at the center of the life of the community.
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Modern pop culture, helped by the powerful electronic media, spread a general Kaffir culture which is very different to traditional Muslim culture. We have the T.V., and video, and Hollywood, and Britpop, and Bollywood, Most powerful of all is modern state education, which does all it can to overwhelm the children with the Kaffir ideas and Kaffir culture and directs the children to think of themselves, not as Muslims and as a member of the Muslim community, but as members of the general community, who should make their lives within that community when they leave school. Imam Ahmad Raza Khan (Rahmatullahi Alaih) realised that this was happening, and developed his own idea that education should aim to make the children in to loyal and useful members of traditional Muslim society.
Modern shopping, the mass super market, undermines the web of local shops that constitute so much of community life. Instead of a mass of Muslim shops, you have a few Muslims with jobs as shelf stackers and check-out staff, in a vast shop like Asda and Tesco. This seems very difficult to resist, if Muslims were to develop their own Asdas, such shops would be Muslim owned, but could hardly follow a policy of employing only Muslim staff. The way forward for the Muslim shop is to find a niche in the market that the super markets can not touch. There are such niches, such as the Halal food trade, the cloth shops, the take-aways etc. But what is required here is a lot of thought by the Muslim economist as to how a Muslim business can survive in the modern economy. For the moment Muslim shops most rely on conducting businesses that big business can not wipe out, and only the loyalty of the Muslim shopper.
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All of these challenges to the existence of the Muslim community have to be carefully studied, and ways discovered of defeating them. This is the intellectual task for Muslim thinkers, whether they be Ulama, or whether they be educated in secular subjects such as economics and sociology. There are real problems and real difficulties here, and plenty of scope for the developing of community organisations to tackle these problems. It is here that energy should be put, not into silly political schemes that make the problems worse.
In conclusion, it is often said that Islam is Din wa Dawla, a religion and a state. This is not true. The whole idea of the state was only brought into Islam recently. What Islam is, is Din wa Umma, a religion and a community. And the religion cannot last without the community.
It is this Muslim Umma, this community which is central. Our loyalty is to this Umma. Culture and politics must serve this Umma, and make it grow and develop, and protect it from any attack. And the way to change the world is by the growth and development of the Umma, of the community. And if this community really grew and shown brightly, it would soon bring the whole world to Islam. For we mustn’t forget that this Umma is the society of Almighty God on earth, and if we live the proper Islamic life within it, we are living in the perfect society of Almighty God. And at the center of out life will be the greatest love and respect for the Prophet (Sall Allahu Alaihi Wa Sallam).